Israeli air strikes and ground operations in the occupied West Bank targeting the Jenin Refugee camp and killing at least 12 Palestinians may prima facie constitute a war crime, UN experts said today.
“Israeli forces’ operations in the occupied West Bank, killing and seriously injuring the occupied population, destroying their homes and infrastructure, and arbitrarily displacing thousands, amount to egregious violations of international law and standards on the use of force and may constitute a war crime,” the experts said.
Israel’s assault on the Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank this week, which killed at least 12 Palestinians including five children, might constitute a war crime, UN experts said on Wednesday.
Houses, apartment buildings and other infrastructure were damaged during two days of raids on Monday and Tuesday, and more than 4,000 Palestinians were forced to flee.
Israel’s actions amounted “to egregious violations of international law and standards on the use of force and may constitute a war crime,” said Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, and Paula Betancur, the special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons.
“The attacks were the fiercest in the West Bank since the destruction of the Jenin camp in 2002,” they added.
Albanese and Betancur highlighted reports of ambulance crews being denied access to the refugee camp, thereby preventing injured people from receiving medical assistance.
“It is heart-breaking to see thousands of Palestinian refugees, originally displaced since 1947-1949, forced to march out of the camp in abject fear at the dead of night,” they said.
Special rapporteurs are part of what is known as the special procedures of the UN Human Rights Council. They are independent experts who work on a voluntary basis, are not members of UN staff and are not paid for their work.
Albanese and Betancur denounced Israel’s “counterterrorism” operation and said there is no justification for such actions under international law.
“The attacks constitute collective punishment of the Palestinian population, who have been labelled a ‘collective security threat’ in the eyes of Israeli authorities,” they said.
They also expressed “grave concern” about the weapons and tactics deployed at least twice over the past two weeks by Israeli forces against the population of Jenin.
“The Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are protected persons under international law, guaranteed of all human rights, including the presumption of innocence,” Albanese and Betancur said.
“They cannot be treated as a collective security threat by the occupying power; all the more while it advances the annexation of occupied Palestinian land, and displacement and dispossession of its Palestinian residents.”
Israel’s operations in Jenin represent “amplifications of the structural violence that has permeated” the Occupied Palestinian Territories for many years, they added.
“The impunity that Israel has enjoyed for its acts of violence over decades only fuel and intensify the recurring cycle of violence.”
The UN experts called for Israel to be held accountable under international law for its “illegal occupation and violent acts to perpetuate it.”
They added: “For this relentless violence to end, Israel’s illegal occupation must end. It cannot be corrected or improved in the margins because it is wrong to the core.”
Palestinians defiant and angry after Israel's Jenin raid
Palestinian militant fighters paraded in Jenin on Wednesday and angry crowds confronted senior Palestinian Authority officials, accusing them of weakness, after one of the largest Israeli military operations in the occupied West Bank in years.
The two-day operation, which the Israeli military said targeted infrastructure and weapons depots of militant factions in the Jenin refugee camp, left a trail of wrecked streets and burned-out cars and sparked fury across the Arab world.
At least 12 Palestinians, most confirmed as militant fighters, were killed and around 100 wounded in an incursion that began with late-night drone strikes, followed by a sweep involving more than 1,000 Israeli troops. One Israeli soldier was killed.
"We stayed inside the house, but then they cut off the electricity then the water," said Mohammad Mansour, a resident of the camp where armoured bulldozers tore up streets to expose roadside bombs, cutting power cables and water pipes.
force on Tuesday evening, leaders of Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad and other armed factions claimed victory, and the mood among residents returning home to the camp appeared defiant.
"We ended up running out of bread and supplies ... I've never been through such days."
At a funeral for 10 of the dead, thousands of mourners, including dozens of gunmen, confronted three senior Palestinian Authority leaders, chanting "Get out! Get out!" They forced them to leave under protection of guards who used tear gas to push back the crowds.
The Authority, which exercises nominal governance over parts of the West Bank, protested against the Israeli operation, which it called a war crime, but was unable to do anything to halt it.
RESIDENTS DEFIANT
Following the withdrawal of the Israeli force on Tuesday evening, leaders of Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad and other armed factions claimed victory, and the mood among residents returning home to the camp appeared defiant.
"They did not get what they wanted, thank God. The youths are fine, the families are fine, and the camp is fine," Mutasem Estatia, a father of six, said after what he described as two nights being kept away, one of them in Israeli detention.
"There are 12 martyrs and we are proud of them, but we expected more damage."
Israeli forces detained 150 suspected militants, seized large caches of money, guns and roadside mines - including an arsenal under a mosque - and destroyed a command centre, the army said. It said all the Palestinians killed were armed fighters. Islamic Jihad claimed eight as members, with Hamas claiming another.
As the troops withdrew overnight, Israel reported a volley of rockets from the Gaza Strip, another Palestinian territory, which is run by Hamas. The rockets were shot down and Israel's air force struck targets in Gaza, causing no casualties.
In a further sign of violence spilling over from Jenin, a Palestinian rammed his car into pedestrians in Tel Aviv and went on a stabbing spree, wounding eight people before he was shot dead. Hamas claimed him as a member.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Tuesday the Jenin operation was unlikely to be a "one-off" and said it would be "the beginning of regular incursions and continuous control of the territory".
In turn, the spokesman for the Al-Quds Brigades, the armed wing of Islamic Jihad, said "every alley and street will soon turn into clashes and fighting fields."
'THINGS WE FACED 20 YEARS AGO'
The scale of the Israeli operation, one of the biggest in 20 years, pointed to the growing strength of the militant groups in Jenin, where Israel estimates almost half the population is affiliated to Islamic Jihad or Hamas.
"War rooms, explosive devices, planting powerful but primitive mines based on solar water heaters or similar objects - these are things we faced 20 years ago in Gaza," said Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, a former army general."
"Only then they were buried in the sand and now they had to be buried in asphalt."
The operation also underlined the weakness of the Palestinian Authority, set up some 30 years ago after the Oslo peace accords, which has been unable to impose itself against either Israel or militant groups in Jenin or nearby Nablus.
Both cities have been traditional centres of Palestinian resistance, but their semi-detached position from Palestinian Authority control has become more pronounced as a wave of violence has swept the West Bank over the past two years.
In Jenin, footage circulating on social media showed hundreds throwing rocks at the wall of the Palestinian Authority governor in the early hours of the morning.
Israel has been fiercely critical of the Palestinian Authority and its president Mahmoud Abbas, 87, accusing them of failing to rein in the militant groups.
PA officials in turn say Israel makes it impossible to exert control by deliberately undermining their authority and blocking any attempt to create the basis for a future Palestinian state in the West Bank, which Israel seized after the 1967 Middle East war.
Surveys show almost 80% of Palestinians want Abbas to resign but without any designated successor and with no elections held for almost 20 years, it remains unclear who might replace him
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